Creative cooking at my best

Menu

Tag Archive | sausage

Wow today you are lucky! You get 4 recipes in one blog post to make one complete meal. 🙂

This morning, we woke up hungry. We don’t have a ton of super easy to make food in the house, but I really wanted breakfast. We didn’t have any milk, so I decided to find a nice fluffy pancake recipe. I found an easy recipe with only ingredients we have in the house. I realized half way through my plans that we don’t have syrup. So,I started this plan what I wanted to put on top of my pancakes first. I decided a strawberry applesauce would be nice.

Now, Jeremy loves over easy eggs, but because I don’t eat eggs, I have only ever learned to make them scrambled. So Jeremy quickly read some internet directions on how to make them, and I did my best. I put some oil in a non stick pan, and I think they actually came out perfectly. I didn’t break the yoke, and they got flipped over and transferred to the plate. They were not super pretty, but I didn’t break the yokes! YAY ME! hehe

Because I don’t eat eggs, I had to come up with some kind of protein for me. I didn’t just want a chicken breast, as that is boring for breakfast, but have not had much luck making sausage that will stay in patties if I grind the meat myself. I have a Ninja food processor/blender system, and in the past I have tried making sausage patties by pulsing raw chicken and adding spices, but they never hold together. Today I was wondering how to change this because grinding meat in a food processor just does not work the same as having meat ground in a meat grinder. Well I remembered my friend Nellena telling me to add a little flour as a binder to my potato cakes the last time she came over, and I wondered if that would work as binder for meat as well. I pulsed them ingredients until it looked like it would hold together, and put the meat in the fridge for about 10 minutes while the fruit was still cooking down to let it rest, and let the gluten work and bind. The flour worked! I was so stoked! Today I actually had sausage patties. YAY! Two total firsts in one meal!

The pancakes were simple, but I noticed that there was more baking powder than I was used to, and because of that I think the pancakes were extremely fluffy. I wish I would have got a better picture, or a pic with my first over easy attempt, but this is what I got before the food was devoured. I had fun cooking it all, but the best part was that it tastes AMAZING!!!!!

Mix wet ingredients together. Mix dry ingredients together in different bowl. Combine the two bowls and stir with hand or a stand mixer. I have a new kitchen aid, and am getting all of the use of out it I can. Get all of the lumps out! Let batter rest for 5 minutes. and put some oil in the pan. Fry the pancakes, flipping when it is full of bubbles. These turn out a little heavy, but very thick and fluffy. I usually hate pancakes, and I LOVE these!

Fruit topping:

3 apples

10 frozen strawberries

4 tablespoons of stevia in the raw (or sugar)

water

Vanilla

Cinnamon

Peel, core, and dice three apples. Place them in a small pot and cover them with water. Put in the strawberries and turn the burner on high. They need to break down, and I kept them on a rolling boil to break down the apples a bit faster than usual. Remember to stir every few minutes so the bottom does not burn. I added the a few shakes of cinnamon, and 1/8th teaspoon vanilla, and a pinch of salt as well as the stevia. Add more water if necessary until the fruit is cooked and broken down to your liking. After the apples are soft, throw about 1/2 of the mixture into the blender to break it down a bit faster if you like (or use an immersion blender), but cooking for a few hours will achieve the same effect…basically making a quick strawberry apple sauce. Taste, add more stevia if necessary. Serve on top of pancakes and pour melted butter either on pancakes or on top of topping…Delicious!

Sausage:

1/2 boneless skinless chicken breast

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1 tablespoon onion powder

a few sprinkles of sage

4 tablespoons of flour

Pulse all of the ingredients in a food processor until meat is broken down and starts sticking to itself. In a Ninja, that takes 10 pulses or less. Be careful not to liquify or puree the meat. You want a little texture. Let it rest in the fridge for 5-10 minutes to let the flour do it’s job. Next, make patties, and throw them in a frying pan with just a little oil. Next time I will throw a little more seasoning in them, and maybe just a touch of oil to make sure they don’t dry out. Make sure they are cooked all the way through and serve. These are oh so good!

And I guess the last recipe is over easy eggs, but you can find directions for that anywhere… 🙂

I was going through my Omnitrition Drops cookbook today, and it mentioned sausage…it sounded good. I got some cabbage the other day and have been meaning to make cabbage rolls, so this sounded perfect.

First problem, no ground chicken: Solved, I made my own. I had three thawed chicken breasts (about 24 oz) and I put them into a food processor with hot smoked paprika, rosemary, parsley, and oregano and pulsed until it was ground. When that was done, I took it out and pulsed the onion and garlic. then I mixed them together.

Next I sliced up 16 oz of cabbage, tomato, celery, and onion.

I cooked 16 oz of the sausage up with the veggies until the chicken and veggies were all cooked and added one tablespoon of tomato paste.

I took the outer leaves off of the head of cabbage, and one by one boiled them. Each was in there for no more than two minutes. When the leaves got pliable they were removed and placed on paper towels to dry.

Next I weighed the sausage and veggie mix. I divided that by 4, and then weighed out 4 servings. I took one serving and wrapped it up in one leaf. This made four full cabbage rolls.

Somehow, the sausage turned out a bit sweet, but a drizzle of Franks Original Red Hot was the perfect compliment!

Last week in my gusto to make a heathy protein filled grab and go breakfast for my husband, I made him some chocolate peanut butter banana muffins with chocolate protein powder. However, on Weight Watchers, although it was a good healthy and filling breakfast, it was not very nice on the plus points scale. Each individual muffin was 11 points. I lost ten lbs in the last week and a half eating a 4 point breakfast smoothie every day, and getting more good stuff in my day than just chocolate peanut butter and bananas, so I decided to check out another solution for Jeremy. I think I found his breakfast for a while. Last night I made a set of breakfast for the week, that I can just freeze, and he can grab, zap in the microwave for 2 minutes from it’s frozen state, and enjoy. In the USA Jeremy and I loved McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches. They were quick, nice and salty, and we liked the taste. However, we all know they are very fatty, and yes, have an heir of grossness to them.

This week, I started googling low carb, high protein breakfasts, and of course lots of eggs came up. I can’t eat eggs, so the thought of cooking with them just does not really occur to me, but my husband enjoys them. So, I started thinking about breakfast sandwiches. I googled how to cook an egg for a breakfast sandwich, because I really had no idea to get that round perfect shape. I came up with a genious idea on the Macheesmo blog about baking your eggs in muffin tins to get nice even round muffins.

Then I clicked on her re-visited version, and saw the scrambled with spinach version. I asked Jeremy which he prefered, and he said the scrambled with spinach, and asked if I could throw in a little tobasco. So, that is what I did when I baked the eggs in the muffin tins.

I was surprised they puffed up as much as they did, but then they deflated a bit while cooling.

I don’t know if the brown, kinda crusty top means I cooked them too long, but I was watching them carefully and this is about the point they were no longer runny in the center.

Next I cooked up the bacon. Instead of using my frying pan like I usually do, I decided to use my grill pan, since I needed it out in a little while anyway and I can cook more at once on the pan, and not so much in their own grease as I would in a frying pan (don’t know why I didn’t think of that sooner!). I cut the strips in half to cook them, so they could just come out of the pan and onto the sandwich.

Once the bacon was done, I got started on the English muffins. The process for these were not what I expected, nor did I expect nearly how long they would take to make! What I expected was an easy standard bread dough, that you maybe flip over half way through baking to get the grilled look on both sides…nope, you actually bake them stove top, like a pancake!

I found the recipe I used at foodiesarsenal.com with the substitution of whole wheat flour instead.

I was very shocked that you don’t make a basic dough, but rather a very thick and sticky better that eventually thickens up a little bit.

After mixing, and pulling and folding a few times, I used the oven which I had previously warmed up, to let the dough rise, it doubled in maybe 45 minutes instead of an hour.

Then on a well floured board (I think I was supposed to use corn meal for this, but flour worked fine), I dumped out my dough, and floured the top. then I gently rolled them out to about maybe 1/2 -2/3 inch, and cut them using my 1 cup measuring cup because it was the closest thing I had to the right size. Next I let them raise for another half hour, and turned on the griddle pan to a medium flame.

Once the first side is golden brown, you flip it over and cook the other side In my case, I only have a flame over the front half of the pan, so the back is a good place to put them to finish baking all the way through while you add some new ones to the front side. This recipe made about 16 muffins. They turned out really tasty! They were light and fluffy, and have all the air holes I remember from traditional English muffins.

Since I don’t eat eggs like my husband, and I love these sandwiches too, I held a little homemade sausage, for a few patties so I could enjoy my sandwiches myself.

Oh, I forgot, because I know my husband does not have the time to heat up his breakfast in the morning, and our schedules are so off, I wanted to show you how I packaged them for the freezer. First I wrapped each one in a small paper towel. Next I put it into a Ziploc baggie, and pushed as much air out as I could. I did read the reviews saying thawing in the microwave would cause grogginess, so I am hoping the paper towel will help catch it…we will see…

One egg muffin in 7 weight watchers plus points, and one sausage one is 5